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arXiv:quant-ph/9604015 · Physical Review A

Capacity of the noisy quantum channel

Seth Lloyd

Published Mar 1, 1997• 779 citations
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Abstract

An upper limit is given to the amount of quantum information that can be transmitted reliably down a noisy, decoherent quantum channel using the high-probability states of quantum sources. A class of quantum error-correcting codes is presented that allows the information transmitted to attain this limit. The result is a quantum analog of Shannon's bound and code for the noisy classical channel [C. E. Shannon and W. Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1948)].

DOI
10.1103/physreva.55.1613

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An upper limit is given to the amount of quantum information that can be transmitted reliably down a noisy, decoherent quantum channel using the high-probability states of quantum sources. A class of quantum error-correcting codes is presented that allows the information transmitted to attain this limit. The result is a quantum analog of Shannon's bound and code for the noisy classical channel [C. E. Shannon and W. Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1948)].
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In analogy with its classical counterpart, a noisy quantum channel is characterized by a loss, a quantity that depends on the channel input and the quantum operation performed by the channel. The loss reflects the transmission quality: if the loss is zero, quantum information can be perfectly transmitted at a rate measured by the quantum source entropy. By using block coding based on sequences of nnn entangled symbols, the average loss (defined as the overall loss of the joint nnn-symbol channel divided by nnn, when $\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{n}\ensuremath{\infty})$ can be made lower than the loss for a single use of the channel. In this context, we examine several upper bounds on the rate at which quantum information can be transmitted reliably via a noisy channel, that is, with an asymptotically vanishing average loss while the one-symbol loss of the channel is nonzero. These bounds on the channel capacity rely on the entropic Singleton bound on quantum error-correcting codes [Phys. Rev. A 56, 1721 (1997)]. Finally, we analyze the Singleton bounds when the noisy quantum channel is supplemented with a classical auxiliary channel.
Communication over a noisy quantum channel introduces errors in the transmission that must be corrected. A fundamental bound on quantum error correction is the quantum capacity, which quantifies the amount of quantum data that can be protected. We show theoretically that two quantum channels, each with a transmission capacity of zero, can have a nonzero capacity when used together. This unveils a rich structure in the theory of quantum communications, implying that the quantum capacity does not completely specify a channel's ability to transmit quantum information.
The maximum rates for information transmission through noisy quantum channels has primarily been developed for memoryless channels, where the noise on each transmitted state is treated as independent. Many real-world communication channels experience noise which is modeled better by errors that are correlated between separate channel uses. In this Brief Report, upper bounds on the classical information capacities of a class of quantum memory channels are derived. The class of channels consists of indecomposable quantum memory channels, a generalization of classical indecomposable finite-state channels.
We present a family of additive quantum error-correcting codes whose capacities exceed those of quantum random coding (hashing) for very noisy channels. These codes provide nonzero capacity in a depolarizing channel for fidelity parameters fff when f>0.80944f>0.80944f>0.80944. Random coding has nonzero capacity only for f>0.81071f>0.81071f>0.81071; by analogy to the classical Shannon coding limit, this value had previously been conjectured to be a lower bound. We use the method introduced by Shor and Smolin of concatenating a nonrandom repetition (cat) code within a random code to obtain good codes. The cat code with block size five is shown to be optimal for single concatenation. The best known multiple-concatenated code we found has a block size of 25. We derive a general relation between the capacity attainable by these concatenation schemes and the coherent information of the inner code states.
In Shannon information theory, the capacity of a memoryless communication channel cannot be increased by the use of feedback from receiver to sender. In this correspondence, the use of classical feedback is shown to provide no increase in the unassisted classical capacity of a memoryless quantum channel when feedback is used across nonentangled input states, or when the channel is an entanglement-breaking channel. This gives a generalization of the Shannon theory for certain classes of feedback protocols when transmitting through noisy quantum communication channels.